Abstract

Analysis of microsatellites was performed to evaluate their role in the hematopoietic stem cell transplantation program. The applicability in the distinguishing of recipient and donor cells during the chimerism following after transplantation was investigated for 10 non-HLA loci. Conversely, the importance of recipient/donor matching for 13 HLA microsatellites in the unrelated transplantation outcome and their role in survival of patients with related donor was investigated. The study included 150 healthy, unrelated subjects and 120 patients who underwent transplantation and their donors. Results of population studies of all microsatellites have not revealed any statistically significant difference between Croatian and other European populations. The investigation showed that non-HLA microsatellite analysis is a method of choice for chimerism determination; all analyzed non-HLA microsatellites satisfied informativeness criteria for this procedure. Furthermore, results indicated that chimerism status is important in transplantation outcome prediction. No correlation was found between a better transplantation outcome and recipient/donor matching for any of the tested HLA microsatellites, but an influence of the TNFa microsatellite on patient survival after transplantation was observed. In conclusion, the microsatellite analysis has an important role in transplantation outcome improvement by enabling timely treatment interventions and indicating patients with a higher risk for developing post-transplantation complications.